Further up, a woman dances alone under the drizzle, earbuds in, lost to whatever rhythm that rules her world. Her coat flares out with each spin. Her joy isn’t performative. It is private. I smile. It is like the world is healing with me.
A jogger passes, nodding at me.
A couple kisses in a doorway.
Life is… continuing.
And somehow, I’m not angry about it.
Maybe, I think I can have that again. Maybe not the Bin-Spirit part—though I’d never trade that chapter for anything—but the closeness.
The spark.
The ridiculous joy.
Maybe I can let myself be loved with no need to be broken first.
Maybe that is Eddy’s actual gift to me.
I reach my building and pause at the front step. Behind me, down the block, I think I hear something. A faint clatter. The soft creak of a bin lid being lifted.
I turn, breath catching. Nothing.
Just wind. City sounds. A feeling in my chest like something old had let go.
I smile. Because maybe, just maybe, he is here too.
Epilogue
~ 6 Months later ~
Ihad never returned to that back alley. Unless I had to dump something in that bin for my job, I stayed away.
Some stories ended behind a dumpster. Now I know some relationships do too.
One day when I had emptied the bins, I found something that I kept. It was a scrap of him. Half of Eddy’s coffee-lid crown from when he had become the monstrous Grouch form. In my grief, I thought everything about him disintegrated that day, but I had tucked it into my bottom drawer.
I don’t know why I had kept it. Maybe because it reminded me I had felt something once. Something deep for another person. Someone worth remembering.
In the months following Eddy’s disappearance, I had tried dating again. But no man had ever made me feel the way I felt with Eddy. And given the number of dates I had been on, I thought no man ever could.
But I had stopped chasing ghosts. With the curse lifted, I can finally live a happier existence. And I meanlive.
Full breaths, deep sleep. Trips to my bin that no longer make me hard at the smell of thrown vegetables. This is freedom.
I had gone through waves of giddiness and terror.
Claudia helped fix the parts of my life I had thought were unfixable. Because who else but a mediumBinfluencercan solve the rest of my problems? Only she, my incense-huffing, latte-scrying, psychic miracle of a friend, could. She had expunged all my records, cleared my fines and made workplace complaints of me getting freaky with trash vanish.
I still don’t know how she did it.
She claimed she had stern words with the universe on my behalf. She also told me I was ‘cosmically overdue’ for a break.
I had asked her what I owed her. She grinned and shook her head. All she had to say was: “You can’t afford me. So, consider your debts wiped and never involve me in your sordid affairs again. Unless you know a balding, chunky bear ghost?”She had a type.
Oh, and I had gotten a job offer within the office. I left my agency and became the Head of Cleaning Operations. It was a title they had created for me. Nothing really had changed in my day-to-day; really, it was just a fancy title for a guy with a clipboard bigger than his mop, and more money that he knew what to do with.
With the promotion, the office had stepped away from the agency entirely. That had meant that I needed to hire someone else to help. I had left the spot vacant for weeks, maybe on purpose. Maybe I didn’t want to walk past someone else’s trolley, someone else’s bin-juice footprints. Someone who wasn’thim.
